Over the centuries, Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy has often been declared the pinnacle of the medieval literary mind. Other critics, looking ahead, have called it a brilliant artistic harbinger of the coming European Renaissance. The renowned Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot went so far to say that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.” Here’s what you need to know about Dante’s Inferno.
Who Was Dante?
Few Western writers have neared the influence and long legacy of Dante, the Italian poet, political philosopher, statesman, and soldier, who lived from 1265 to 1321. His undisputed, epic masterpiece is, of course, The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia), which takes the reader on an allegorical, three-part Christian journey that commences in the fiery pits of Hell, exits to Purgatory, and finally ascends to heavenly Paradise far above. As for a hero, it’s none other than the pilgrim “Dante” himself, but only made possible through the sage guidance of his spectral companion, the ancient Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid.
Hell is Other People
Of the tome’s trio of parts, Dante’s overwhelming vision of the archetypal Roman Catholic underworld is by far the best known and most iconic, starting with the successive, narrowing concentric “circles of Hell” to which Dante and Virgil descend, finally reaching the lair of a three-headed Prince of Darkness himself, Lucifer. On their way down, the writer Dante conjures up a biblical creep show of sins, sinners, and their wretched, tailor-made just punishments. The destination of this TheCollector journey is the Inferno, released first as a manuscript circa 1314.
Dante’s accomplishment is made even more painstakingly impressive since he wrote the entire work in his own rhyming, interlocking metered verse he called terza rima. Each stanza comprises three lines, and all of those are grouped into major sections called cantos (think of them as chapters). Each of the three parts of the Comedy contains 33 cantos, while each canto contains from 115 to 160 lines. All together there are 14,233 total lines, each arranged in what’s called hendecasyllabic verse, which means that there are (almost always) 11 syllables to each line. Thus, in perhaps the Inferno’s most memorable line, he writes, “All hope abandon, ye who enter in.” Naturally, there’s something “lost in translation” here since Dante wrote in Tuscan Italian.
Going Medieval
Speaking of famous lines, readers may be reminded of “The horror! The horror!” from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as Dante and Virgil bear witness to scene after scene of sinners and their harrowing punishments. This Hell is built from a litany of sources, whether the New Testament, major theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, or Virgil’s own Aeneid. Whether the Inferno strikes modern readers as fiery, chilling or just plain cold, above all it should be realized that the notion of a palpable, certain afterlife of never-ending pain and punishment for evildoers was no idle speculation for the vast majority of medieval Europeans.
For rich and poor, royal and peasant, the “road to perdition” had been drummed into them from the pulpit by centuries of fire-and-brimstone parish priests. The principal idea, of course, starting with Jesus’ teachings, was to proscribe bad behavior and immorality (as the Church would define them) by dangling either the prospect of infernal Hell or eternal Heaven before the flock.
Nevertheless, Dante’s choices on who exactly goes to Hell reflect almost as much on his own life and struggles (and enemies) as it does on Church doctrine. While several of the underworld circles punitively correspond to the classical notion of the “seven deadly sins” (greed, sloth, lust, pride, gluttony, envy, wrath), Dante also makes room for flatterers, fraudsters, hypocrites, suicides, and even a few departed, infamously corrupt popes.
Among the most pitiable are the flatterers, sentenced to one of the ten foul ditches within the eighth circle. Covered in their own excrement, they lie and writhe for eternity, snorting like pigs. As for those virtuous pagans born before Christ and thus never baptized—like Virgil himself and ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle—they are doomed to Hell, but reside in the relative pastoral calm of Limbo.
The Ultimate Disincentive
Many, if not most, readers today might judge Dante’s God-like “thumbs down” mortal judgments archaic and hopelessly mired in old-school Church dogma, or at least vainly presumptuous. But if his underworld cosmology doesn’t always reflect strict Christian theology, he lays out in minute detail what amounts to moral statements on the doctrine of worldly evil, and who perhaps deserves to be in Hell.
Ultimately, however, as Dante scholar Professor Peter Bondanella puts it, the greatest, most terrifying consequence of mortal sin isn’t primarily the punishment itself, but rather the sinner’s perpetual separation from the love and presence of God. More pointedly, one can also argue that the classic Christian notion of divine retribution served as a pretty effective disincentive for potential malfeasance over the centuries—as well as a corrective path to reform and forgiveness. One only needs to cast a cold eye towards the hundreds of millions killed in war or genocides in the secularized 20th century to wonder if the modern world would indeed be a better place if the prospect of a personal Hell was treated with deference instead of as a quaint (or silly) myth.
But before we get to the bottom of Dante’s Hell, so to speak, readers might be wondering how he got there in the first place. In the very first, memorable stanza, he writes that he found himself “within a forest dark … midway upon the journey of our life.” Again, within an allegorical structure, Dante invites readers to envision his journey to be neither purely personal nor to be taken too literally. Instead it is a symbolic odyssey of any Christian “Everyman” on his or her long and difficult road from life to the afterlife.
Numerology is also important in the work, as are days of the week. For instance, biblical passages often cite a man’s lifespan as 70 (“three score and ten”), and thus midway would be 35. For Dante, that would have been in the year 1300. Further digging into the work reveals that Dante intended his alter ego’s trek to begin on approximately Friday, March 25 of that year, which fittingly was a Good Friday during Christian Holy Week. By extension, Dante the pilgrim would traverse Purgatory during Saturday, righteously entering Heaven a few days after Easter Sunday, accompanied now by his adored Beatrice, the muse and immortal love of his life.
Monsters and Demons
Accompanied by the “shade” (ghost or spirit) of Virgil, Dante encounters every sort of iconographic staple of Christian Hades that has since made its way from religion into popular culture, from monsters, demons, and giants to the damned mortals. There’s the old boatman Charon, who ferries doomed travelers across the river Acheron into Hell proper; Cerberus, the three-headed dog, keeping guard over the gluttonous in the third circle; the River Styx, separating the fifth from the sixth circle; and, of course, Lucifer (aka Satan, aka Beelzebub) himself, the fallen angel, in the ninth and last circle, the smallest and deepest confines of Hell, at the center of the Earth.
While enormous and grotesque with three human heads and six bat-like wings, Dante’s Lucifer (or “Dis”) is neither the cunning Mephistopheles nor the profane, shape-shifting monster of much pop legend; instead he sits halfway encased in ice, weeping, an almost pathetic figure were it not for the super sinners he gnashes on in his three mouths.
And who are these last and worst of Hell’s condemned? First and foremost is Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus Christ. From a Christian perspective, it’s somewhat surprising that Dante would similarly serve up Cassius and Brutus, the two pagan plotters behind the notorious “Ides of March” assassination of Rome’s Julius Caesar. All together, if any literary work is expressly designed to put the fear of God in the reader, the Inferno is it. Throughout Dante’s nightmare journey, he is continually reminded by Virgil to refrain from sympathy for those suffering the pains of Hell. Had they not died without sincere contrition through Christ—and therefore graced with God’s forgiveness—they would not have been so judged. They had their chance and they blew it.
After Dante’s Inferno: Seeing Stars
If the Inferno sometimes feels like Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth done as a horror-fantasy saga, there is a happy ending of sorts, or at least the promise of one—thus Dante could call his magnum opus a “comedy” instead of a tragedy. Descending like mountain climbers over Lucifer’s hairy body, Dante and Virgil escape to the opposite side of the Earth, where they will next pass into Purgatory, the probationary world where common sins can be cleansed through prayer and chastisement.
Dante the Poet extinguishes his Inferno on a note of wonder and relief, which will rhyme with the way he ends the remaining two parts. Only a day earlier lost in a forest of darkness and mid-life confusion, then enduring a guided trip through Hell, he concludes, “Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.” Looking up, it’s a sure sign he is back on the straight and narrow path, headed to higher ground. Last stop: Heaven.
